Just in case

Spring cleaning at the voodoo bungalow is no small thing. We are all messy people with squirrel-like proclivities--there are, in fact, peanuts stuffed down the sides of the couch, just in case. Luke never met a photocopied conference programme from 1987 or a grade sheet from three years back in a different country that he didn't want to keep, just in case. Elvis hides socks all over the place, just in case. I cannot throw out anything that has the handwriting of a loved one, just in case. (Just in case it turns out to be the last thing they wrote or just in case my action starts the wheel turning and something bad happens next. I am clearly the craziest one. Yay me!)

But this year I'm getting serious about this whole down-sizing thing. That means it is time to say goodbye to some of the mommy hoard.
--plastic bag full of baby spoons, one with a tiny toothmark. I don't know if this is Lief's toothmark or one that was there when the spoon was passed down. I might have been hoarding a spoon with my 15yo niece's toothmark on it, which would cause her to roll her eyes and say "Eww, gross."
--two pieces of gravel that might have been given to me/thrown at me by my baby at the swings park. Or might have simply fallen out of one of his socks.
--one "Tiny Swimmer" disposable bathing suit in size 9mo. I kept it because "tiny swimmer" reminded me bitterly of how I got to be in the predicament of being in my bathing suit, lumpy and old and disheveled and now also wet, in public, with strangers, at 8.30 on a Wednesday morning, in the FIRST PLACE. One of the things I'd like to have less of is bitterness.
--that's not true. I love bitterness. It smells like victory. I want more.
--the earring that Lief found underneath our table at Brava, the first time he went anywhere with us. That was also the last time he went anywhere with us, for a very long time. That was the night he also found and ate someone's lipstick under the table at Brava. Well, he actually found it in someone else's purse under someone else's table at Brava. . . . It was actually a really nice shade and I kept it to try and match it against different brands at the cosmetics counter at the downtown Bay one afternoon. This is an episode in my life that I should probably try to forget. Farewell, baggie containing someone else's half-eaten lipstick from 6.5 years ago!
Scared yet?
I originally wrote "sacred yet?" And now I'm worried that there are no mistakes, Freud is 100% spot on and if I throw these things out I will be losing some holy part of my life. Something sacred and memorable, deep, religious, chthonic, powerful. I could be losing something important forever.
Good enough.
Out. The. Door.

Peanut butter and gi

In 15 minutes the kids are supposed to be barefoot and obedient in their karate class. Instead they're downstairs drinking Coke, eating crackers and peanut butter, and horsing around with Lego Atlantis.

They're happy, but I'm happier: I don't have to get in the goat-mobile to drive them to class, wait for them to figure out how to get into their little pajamas, wait some more while they're actually shuffling and whacking and whooping and hollering, wait again while they try to remember what locker they put their boy panties in, wait in the parking lot to get out, wait in the turn lane, drive all around the twisty-turny suburban cul-de-sacs and crescents that GOD HELP US if we ever have to evacuate this city, we'll all be circling our own neighborhoods for 25 minutes trying to figure out how to get out, and all this in a rusting stationwagon that smells like a certain sweaty coonhound. And all this while trying to edit a business proposal that must be out the door in about an hour. In Los Angeles. And WHOSE bright idea was it to forbid open bottles of alcohol in moving vehicles?

I think I'll couch this latest parenting failure in terms of a beaming gift of childhood. Here, boys, take it easy. Eat some junk food. Teach each other some swear words in the basement. You're welcome. Don't get Jiffy on your gi or I'll skin you alive.

Out the door

I have a new mantra. It works in many different situations, trips off the tongue, and gives me that tingly feeling that only radical inattention to reality can give one.

27 metric tonnes of The New Yorker back issues. Out the door!

Two bags of organic potatoes from three months ago that have organized and agreed upon a rudimentary language. Out the door!

34 mismatched grey man socks, some of which have been lonely in four countries. Out the door!

Farty coonhound. Out the door!

Six-year-old curmudgeon in weird clothes. Out the door!

Three-paragraph fables about how great a company's motley collection of SVPs are. Out the door!

Fantasies of glamorous work attire. Out the door!

Bake-sale burnt offerings. Out the door!

Middle-aged woman with eye bags/saddle bags/shopping bags struggling beneath weight of 11 overdue library books, responsibility for purchasing nutritious boy-approved lunch, persistent nagging doubts about creative life and burning desire to do somethinganythingohmyGOD about the grey.

Out. The. Door.